26-31 Robert Dawson.qxp:Ceramic Review

1 Don’t You Know It’s Gonna Be All Right,
2004, W480cm 2 …With Sovereignty
and Action (detail), 2006, W480cm
3 Old New Borrowed Blue, mural at
Churchill Hospital, Oxford
Tilted&
Skewed
Bonnie Kemske is mesmerised by Robert Dawson’s
intriguing tiled walls.
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In The Eyes of the Skin the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa challenges
our culture’s emphasis on visual clarity. His statement that our
experience is adversely limited by our obsession with ‘focused
vision, conscious intentionality and perspectival representation’,
can just as easily be applied to contemporary ceramics. He proposes
that we cultivate our unfocused and peripheral vision to take us
beyond being ‘mere spectators’. Robert Dawson’s works, in particular
his large tile installations, exploit these issues as he plays both
clarity and perspective off each of their opposites and off our
own expectations.
When speaking to Dawson it is easy to see that these artistic
issues arise from a view of the world that is, to say the least,
unsettled. Perhaps this view is partly due to his undefined identity.
Most of us are given our cultural and national identities – Dawson
seems not to have inherited one. Although now London-based, he
was born in the USA and raised in Geneva, but considers neither his
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home. ‘The world is so uncertain’, he says, ‘and I’ve always felt
uncertain about myself. It’s like being stoned or something, where
things are tilted, skewed. But not just the outside things – things on
the inside too’.
He has turned this unsettled outlook into a strength in works
such as Don’t You Know It’s Gonna Be All Right (2004), a large tiled mural
of a repeated familiar motif that visually pulls away, distorts and
disintegrates in the centre. Our normal orientation is challenged in
works such as Verticality (2007), where dinner plates based on the
Willow Pattern, which you would expect to see flat on a table, are
mounted as a vertical wall installation. Again, in Floored (2008) an
image based on Victorian Minton floor tiles is mounted on the
vertical. Yellow Brick Road meets Alice’s Looking Glass; the tiles
lead you towards a vanishing point somewhere in the distance, but
rather than being underfoot, they go up and into the wall. As you
look at Shallow Bond (2008) you suddenly recognise its purply-blue
waves as the marks in the adhesive that a tiler makes to secure the
tiles to the wall, what Dawson calls the professional tiler’s ‘action
painting’. What was hidden has migrated to become the focus.
Dawson’s earlier well-known plates with distorted and
fragmented blue Willow Pattern – for instance Can You Walk From the
Garden? Does Your Heart Understand? (1995) and In Perspective Willow (1996)
– were made through the use of photography, especially the wideangle lens. ‘You get these angles that don’t really exist and you can
employ many camera angles, because we live in a world where the
language of photography now exists and we are familiar with it.
Like you can put a movie camera on the floor and shoot from there,
but in the past nobody would paint a picture from a position such
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4 Play On, The Art House, Wakefield
5 After Willow Pattern platter, Ø32cm
6 Untitled (floor tiles), print on ceramic tiles,
2003, W15cm each 7 Verticality, print on
bone china, Ø27cm each 8 Untitled (tilings
with urinal images), print on ceramic tiles,
H210cm (with Steve Bunn)
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as that.’ The photographs were then screen-printed (in the earliest
work) and reproduced using a photocopier (in the later).
In the current work photographs are manipulated on the
computer, then pushed beyond the software’s limits to create
unfocused areas and, in some cases, ‘tide marks’ and what appear
to be contour lines. An example of this is You Too Can be Confident (2000),
a 1.2 x 4.8 metre wall installation, where a focused aspect becomes
simply blue and a baroque pattern becomes unreadable. Dawson has
stretched the normal constraints of the software to produce this
‘accidental’ blurred decoration, rather than the rigidly focused and
more controlled and defined images normally associated with the
use of the computer.
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Another large tiled project that could not have been created
without the computer was a commission at the Churchill Hospital,
Oxford, installed in July 2008. Made in standard 15 x 15 centimetre
tiles, the mural consists of one image, a close-up of a giant tilted
blue Willow Pattern plate that more than fills the wall, spanning 3.7
x 7.5 metres. Of all Dawson’s wall work, this one may be the most
immediate and powerful to date. The giant plate appears to be
dramatically sliding off the wall to the floor beneath your feet.
THE GRID Underlying all the visual warpages and distortions he uses
is the permanence of the tile grid. Dawson uses perfectly formed
industrially-produced tiles. ‘The grid becomes the sanity that shows
up the insanity’. He has further exploited this in a commission for
The Art House in Wakefield, Yorkshire, which provides studio and
exhibition opportunities to disabled and non-disabled artists and
craftspeople. Entitled Play On (2007) the piece comprises approximately
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2,500 tiles and through seven discrete panels spans 28 metres, almost
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covering the upper area of the building’s façade. In this multi-sectioned
mural the original black and white grid of a chessboard goes from
small to large with Escher-esque corners, twists, and impossible
angles. As with much of his work, the optical illusions have multistability, the images move inwards and outwards, being visually
neither stable nor totally unstable.
Not all the tiled work is on the scale of public art however. Durbar
(2008) is made up of two panels of nine 15 x 15 centimetre tiles in
3 x 3 grids. This piece takes its inspiration from the Durbar Hall in
Hastings Museum, Kent, created by nineteenth century Indian
craftsmen using Islamic patterns. In this piece Dawson explored and
exploited ‘accidental’ cracking through several different processes,
which included photography, laser printing of iron oxide and the
cracking quality of clay. Having made nine cracked tiles that make
up a square he had photographic transfers made for another nine.
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So the image was re-created but with a markedly different quality.
The two types of tiles, cracked in reality and cracked in image, were
intermingled on the two panels.
In creating new work, Dawson says he is often motivated by
a desire to avoid the current fashions in ceramics and the broader
art world. When he sees something, he is impelled to create the
opposite. He says that this is because he does not look deep inside
(and does not want to), but reacts with immediacy to the world
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around him. The embrace of the different perspective and the
skewed outlook that is evident in his work, leads him to state,
‘The only thing I’d “worship” is the mystery itself – and instability,
change, and our insecurity. If we didn’t have these, if we weren’t
so vulnerable, life would be unliveable.’ This attitude reflects a kind
of self-effacing self-consciousness that is evident in his work, a
quality that is both engaging and rewardingly demanding at the
same time.
Dawson does not like to be referred to as a post-modernist,
yet the uncertainty he expresses both personally and in his work
exemplifies post-modernism, as does his discerning references to
ceramic history, his use of ornate decorative prints that he presents
9 …With Sublimation Climaxing, 2005,
W800cm 10 In Perspective tiling, 1993,
W120cm 11 You Too Can be Confident
(detail), 2000, W180cm 12 Can You Walk
From the Garden? Does Your Heart
Understand?, 1995, Ø27cm each
Exhibitions Object Factory: the Art of
Industrial Ceramics, Museum of Arts and
Design, New York, USA, 6 May-23 August
2009; House of Words: Celebrating the
tercentenary of the birth of Dr Johnson in
2009, Dr Johnson’s House, London, JuneAugust 2009; Fragiles – Porcelain, Glass
& Ceramics, Al Sabbah Art and Design
Collection, Dubai, Summer 2009 (dates
to be confirmed); V&A New Ceramics
Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London, opening 18 September 2009
Stockist Aesthetic Sabotage, London
Email [email protected]
Web www.aestheticsabotage.com
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with both gentle mockery and deference, the fragmentation of
those images and the disturbance of perspective that de-centres
the viewer. More than any of these, however, it is his quiet use
of irony that shouts post-modernism loudest – irony of perspective,
of planar orientation and of the sabotage of familiar patterns and
images that form part of our ceramic vocabulary. However, it is an
irony without cynicism or cruelty, a positive, softly-humoured
challenge rather than a brutal attack.
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